Zamba

by Ralph Helfer

  “What have you decided?” he asked.

  “Doc, I just can’t risk putting him out,” I said, not able to look him in the eye. “So I’ve decided to clean it out myself—to give it a try, anyway. I think he’ll let me. I really do.”

  Doc was thunderstruck. “WHAT! Are you crazy? The procedure is very delicate, and he’ll eat you alive—friend or no friend. I can’t let you do this, Ralph.”

  “Look, here’s how I figure it,” I said. I knew I needed his 100 percent cooperation, and kept talking as if the sound of my voice could convince him. “You know I’ve had quite a bit of training in the veterinary field.”

  In the early days of my career, there simply weren’t very many vets who were capable of working with exotic animals. In most cases, it wasn’t ignorance, but lack of opportunity: it was hard to get close enough to a fear-trained animal to examine and treat it. How can you physically examine an animal that’s never been touched by a human in kindness? Add physical pain or sickness to that equation—disorienting experiences for any animal (or any human, for that matter)—and the situation could become dangerous very quickly.

  Most zoo vets used tranquilizers when they needed to treat exotics, which made it even more dangerous. They’d have to correctly gauge the weight of the animal to get the dose correct, and then deal with an animal that was hallucinating, unpredictable, and suffering from the side effects of the tranquilizers, which often included diarrhea and a racing pulse—all of which made it impossible to really get a reading on the animal’s health and to treat it properly. Too little of the drug, and the animal would become insane with pain and rage; too much, and death by overdose was a very real possibility.

  Because of this shortage of capable doctors, I’d had to learn the basics to treat my own animals, and I had taken a number of courses in the hopes that I’d eventually be able to afford tuition for veterinary school. My business eventually took too much of my time for me to pursue that dream, but I picked up quite a bit of information, and it was to stand me in good stead over the years. At first I treated only minor cuts and bruises, but as I became more experienced (and as circumstances on the ranch dictated), I did bigger and bigger procedures. Our animals, of course, were affection trained, which means that you didn’t need a tranquilizer to help them, much less to find out what was wrong in the first place.

  Doc nodded.

  “Zamba trusts me, Doc. I can’t stand the risk of putting him under. Maybe I can pull it off. You tell me what needs to be done and I’ll do everything you say.”

  “Right. Just like that? Ralph, this is crazy.” Doc’s face was the shade of a ruby red grapefruit. “You’ll see. That whole area is ultra-sensitive. Just touching it will be so painful, he’ll bite your finger off!”

  “Doc, come on now. Zamba?”

  Doc took a big gulp of air and was quiet a few moments. He looked at Zamba, then at me, and slowly nodded. “Okay, okay, I’ll help. But as soon as I feel like this is getting too dangerous, I’m pulling the plug.”

  We spread a large sterile towel on the grass and placed Zamba’s massive head in the middle of it. Doc laid out all his instruments.

  “Here,” he instructed. “Rub this on the gums gently.”

  He handed me a salve that Zamba didn’t particularly like but allowed me to administer.

  “It will numb the area a bit, and cut down on the pain. The tooth is impacted, with pus coming from the decayed root at the base.” He held up a small instrument, made from a strong fiber, flexible and tough. It was just a little thicker than a horse’s hair, and had a tiny scoop at the end of it. “Look at the tip of the fang. You see that small hole, right at the end? You have to take this pick and slowly, carefully, work it all the way down into the tooth to the root. As you go, scoop a little bit of the pus, draw it out, and go back for more.”

  The scoop was so small, I wondered if it could do the job. But I trusted Doc, so I washed my hands, sterilized the scoop, and rubbed Zamba’s gum with more of the deadening cream. I was ready.

  I laid Zamba’s head on my lap and began to comb his mane. This was his favorite position, and he could relax this way for hours. Taking up the scoop, I gently slid back his lip and opened his mouth. I put the scoop into the small hole at the top of his fang, and slowly started to push. There was pus immediately. As I scooped, Zamba moaned off and on, and shifted his weight whenever I hit what Doc called a “hot spot.” As I neared the base of the tooth, the pain seemed to intensify. Doc cautioned me that soon I would be hitting the nerves, and Zamba’s pain would be excruciating.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  The pus was running freely now, and Zam was coughing up the spume that was running down his throat. I placed heavy gauze around the tooth to catch as much as possible. The odor was horrendous. I spoke to Zam the whole time, telling him over and over how great a lion he was, and how impressed I was with his bravery. I could tell he was in terrible pain.

  The fang was huge. For the better part of an hour I worked on that tooth, and Zamba let me do it. Once he stood up and shook his head, spraying pus, saliva, and blood all over Doc and me. We gave him a bowl of fresh water. He put his whole mouth in it and held it there. The bowl was instantly filled with the rot from his mouth, so we replaced it with another bowl. This one he emptied in a couple of gulps.

  “Now for the hard part,” said Doc. I noticed he was sweating as hard as I was.

  I was bent over in a difficult position, and my back was killing me. As I dug deeper and deeper into the tooth, Zamba’s body began to tense. Zamba and I were working in tandem. He was holding his breath, tightening throughout his entire body while I dug, and then, when I stopped, he’d let the breath out in a huge exhalation.

  Doc was awed. “My God, this is amazing. Why is he letting you do this? He can’t possibly know you’re trying to help him.”

  I was just approaching the nerve center. The stench was unmistakable: putrid, rotted flesh. Zamba’s eyes were closed.

  “Wait a minute,” said Doc.

  He gave me a small syringe full of anesthetic. I inserted it into the hole at the tip of the fang and squeezed. The liquid running down the inside of the tooth seemed to cool the heat generated by the infection, and Zamba’s body relaxed a bit.

  “Let the anesthetic take effect—it’ll be about five minutes.”

  Zamba, thinking it was all over, started to get up.

  “Easy, boy, not just yet. Only a bit more to go.”

  Zamba eased back down and gave an exhausted sigh. It was clear that this had been a terrible ordeal for him. I combed his mane for a while, and then sponged his face and brow with a wet cloth.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” said Doc, wiping his brow.

  I steadied the scoop and moved it farther into the tooth than I had gotten before. I felt resistance, as if something was stopping it. I pushed gently, and suddenly the spongy thickness gave way, as if something had exploded.

  Zamba let out a full-blown roar, knocking me over as he leaped to his feet. He was up coughing, wheezing, and shaking his head violently, and a huge volume of pus, mucus, blood, and saliva splattered over Doc and me. Doc disappeared over the nearest rise.

  When I got my breath back, I ran to Zamba, who gave me his first-ever snarl. I answered back with a hug and lots of baby talk until he bumped against me and gave me a grudging grumble. Doc reappeared, and I helped him pick up his scattered equipment.

  “You did it, son of a bitch, I don’t believe it!”

  “What happened?” I said.

  “You broke through into the decayed root. It’s taken the pressure off.”

  For the next half hour we squeezed antiseptic, penicillin, and streptomycin into the hole. I gave Zamba a couple of antibiotic shots in his butt. He’d gotten all his shots there since he was a cub, so they didn’t bother him a bit.

  For the next few weeks Doc and I watched him, treating when necessary. We filled the cavity, and Doc soldered a cap on the tip of the tooth to prevent anyth
ing from getting into it. At this point, the tooth had no feeling, so it wasn’t too difficult a job. Over time, the tooth darkened a bit, but it never gave Zamba another moment’s trouble.

  Doc and I talked about our intervention many times after that day. First of all, it was sobering to realize that if Zamba had been in the wild, he’d be dead. A lion that can’t hunt is a lion that doesn’t eat, and that’s a dead lion. And if starvation hadn’t gotten him, the infection would have.

  Then there were all the questions. Why did Zamba allow me to do what I did? Could he possibly have understood what I was doing? Did he allow me to “hurt” him because of his love for me, or is it possible that he knew exactly what was going on? Whatever the reason, my Zamba, God bless him, was back as good as new.

  It was further evidence of the tremendous trust that affection training could foster in animals, and the awesome power this training had to facilitate communication between the species.

  13

  Once trained, Zamba worked steadily, and I’m happy to report that when we were working, Zamba was always a real pro. We did lots of commercials, and any number of film and television appearances. You’re probably wondering if you’ve seen him in anything. If you were watching TV or movies in the sixties and seventies, the answer is almost definitely yes.

  He was the Dreyfus lion for years, for example. He did a Kit Kat commercial, and one for the movie Around the World in Eighty Days. He worked live as well: he was the lion for Hallelujah Hollywood at the MGM Grand Hotel, a massive stage tribute to classic Hollywood. There are many more examples—too many to remember or mention. It was Zambamania!

  To be sure, the first few years with Zamba weren’t easy, financially. Nobody believed that affection-trained animals were for real, and my competitors spread rumors that my animals were so well-behaved because they were tranquilized. But eventually the tables turned—the insurance companies began refusing to insure sets that used other people’s animals because they were too dangerous.

  That danger, I think, is the biggest difference between an animal that’s affection trained and one that isn’t. Let’s say you’re walking across the studio lot with a lion on a lead, and something happens—the lion steps on a “hot” electrical line, for instance, and gets a shock. Nine out of ten animals are going to turn on the nearest human in pain and outrage, which can be a very dangerous situation—not just for you, but for everyone on the set. But an affection-trained animal won’t automatically “blame” you, and may even turn to you for comfort instead. It’s a much safer scenario overall.

  In Hollywood, it really is true that you are who you know. Stuntmen, property masters, producers—everyone who worked with us knew that my animals were gentle, trustworthy, and easy to work with, and the word-of-mouth really helped our business. Movie sets are dangerous enough without adding risk. Nobody wants to be scared of the wild animals on the set, and with me they didn’t have to be.

  We had an agreement with the studios that there would be no guns on the set with the animals. It was simply too dangerous; someone could easily misinterpret an animal’s actions and overreact. What if the animal jumped up playfully, or someone didn’t see me giving him a cue? Or if they made a mistake, which happened from time to time? My crew carried canisters of carbon dioxide, which would release smoke, a loud noise, and a puff of harmless gas—all we needed on the off chance that something went wrong, as I well knew from my early experience with Rex.

  The very idea of someone doing violence to one of my animals in “self-protection” was enough to make me insane. Once, Zamba and I were called into Paramount to do a scene with Jerry Lewis. The job was a piece of cake, a simple sight gag. All Zamba had to do was stand next to Jerry on the balcony of a set made to look like an enormous hotel. They got it in one take.

  As Zamba and I were heading down the stairs, someone called out to Lewis, telling him how well the shot had gone. He said, “Well, I came prepared,” and pulled a gun out of his inside pocket. “If anything had happened, I would have taken care of it.” He blew away an imaginary wisp of smoke at the tip of the barrel.

  My anger took my breath away. Anything could have happened! And then Zamba’s beautiful life would have been snuffed out. I completely lost control, and got up in his face. “You mean you would have shot my lion if you thought he was going to do something? How can you judge? Who in the hell do you think you are?” I yelled, loud enough to stop everyone in earshot. “That pea shooter would have only made him mad enough to chew your ass.”

  Jerry had me thrown off the set, and got me barred from working at the studio for six months until he was finished with his movie and had moved on. I didn’t care—there was other work for us. Nobody threatened my lion.

  It’s pretty rare that directors ask for an animal star by name, but soon everybody knew that Zamba was the crème de la crème. He was the go-to cat for close-ups, because of his extreme beauty, and he was the cat everyone turned to when they needed a lion to work with a movie star. In the same way that the high-wattage stars get the best trailers and the best makeup artists, they also got the best lion. Zamba was a star’s star.

  And he became well-known around Hollywood. I’d be working another job, and he’d be in the car with me. Ordinarily you needed a lot of paperwork to get animals on and off the studio lots, but everyone was a Zamba fan, and the guards would just wave us through.

  We met a lot of people that way. I worked with Robert Mitchum on a picture called Rampage. The script had originally called for a jaguar, but everyone told the director you couldn’t train a jaguar, so he had changed the cat to a leopard and called me to see if I had one. I did—but I also had a great jaguar called Raunchy who could do the role as it had been written. Raunchy and Zamba were buddies, so I’d often bring Zamba with me to the shoot to keep Raunchy company, and over the course of filming, he and Robert Mitchum became good friends.

  It took a while, but affection training caught on, and I don’t think I’m bragging when I say that we revolutionized the motion picture and television industry. Insurance companies heard about affection training and literally demanded that the studios use our animals because they were safer. Eventually our company, Africa U.S.A., became the world’s largest exotic animal rental company. Our animals were used in movies, television, stage, and private performances. I have invoices in my files for more than thirty-five hundred jobs.

  We had more than fifteen hundred animals, including elephants, tigers, lions, leopards, cheetahs, giraffes, various types of antelopes, camels, llamas, gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, rhinos, hippopotamuses, eagles, and ostriches. We also had an assortment of reptiles, which included alligators, pythons, cobras, rattlesnakes, and several varieties of insects, including praying mantises and tarantulas. We had a barnyard full of farm stock—cows and pigs and sheep—and of course, a number of dogs and cats.

  We were the proud winners of a couple of dozen PATSY (Performing Animal Top Star of the Year) Awards, the “animal Oscars” given out by the American Humane Association. Zamba took home four or five of those as well.

  We also trained a great number of the men and women who went on to do some of the best animal work in Hollywood. I never hired an experienced animal trainer, preferring to teach animal lovers the principles behind affection training. (To be honest, I hate the word “trainer,” which has a whiff of the master-slave relationship for me. And you can forget about “tamer,” for the same reason. I always call myself a behaviorist if I have to call myself anything.) I learned fairly early that it was easier to start from scratch. People who had experience “taming” animals found it too hard to abandon their bad old ways, and I’d find myself listening to them talking about “how you have to give a lion a crack every once in a while so he remembers who’s boss.” Not around my lions, thank you very much!

  As much as Zamba worked, it was always a disappointment to me that the movie industry persisted in reinforcing stereotypes about exotic animals, especially the big cats. I rarely
got calls for Zamba to show his loving and playful side—they always wanted him to be a killer. Even Clarence, our cross-eyed lion, who looked like the least threatening animal on earth, got roles that called for him to be part of a sight gag, instead of demonstrating any measure of affection in his personality. It’s ironic how committed Hollywood was (and remains) to this vision of lions as savage beasts, especially considering that there’s never been an animal who kills as viciously and indiscriminately as humans.

  Every young starlet hopes for a break, and every older actress bemoans the lack of decent roles for older women. As it became clear what a real prize Zamba was, as both an actor and all-around good sport, I wondered if there would ever be a movie just for him, a star vehicle. If anyone deserved one, it was he, but Hollywood didn’t seem ready to let an exotic animal have that big a role. Dogs and cats, sure—even a bear, like Gentle Ben—but not a lion.

  14

  Our animal family was growing and we needed room, so when Zamba was about two years old and two hundred pounds, I had found a larger ranch in the Santa Monica Hills and moved in. I kept the old place and split time between the two.

  A lot of animals—and people—came to us because the word was out about our cruelty-free methods and our inability to say no to an animal in need. I became great friends with the actress Mae West and her sister by taking an extremely smart and talented (but badly spoiled) chimp called Coffee off their hands. And Coffee the prankster became an Elvis Presley favorite when he was out at the ranch. But that’s another story for another time.

  My team of helpers and behaviorists had come together from all parts of the country. Each person was a dedicated animal lover who had heard of my specialized work in the behavioral training of exotic animals. Although some had no professional knowledge of animals, they brought with them something far more important—love.